"Duhr-viant Staff"

Some of you knew this one was coming. I made some rants regarding Deviantart's community, but I've yet to touch one of Deviantart's most flawed aspects...

The Staff.

Yes, I know that administrating such a large community can be a pain in the ass. Yes, I know that despite all the bad things I have to say about that place, I still hang around it (I'll be touching this subject later)... but that doesn't invalidate the fact that some, if not most of the policies being carried out by DA staff are completely ridiculous!

First is the way we can (not) customize our own page without first laying a few bucks. You want to put a cute image you've uploaded into photobucket on your ID field, or journal? Want to put an html code for a link?

Pay for it!

What the fuck?! I know, I have a premium membership, which might seem hypocritical of me. However, as an artist, having an organized page adds up to people feeling like following your work.

What I'm saying is that while having a premium membership can bring some cool features, some premium-only exclusive features are completely pointless to remain premium-only, like those html codes!

And let's not get started on what many, many people complain about... their nazi-like politics on nude stuff, and their criteria to evaluate what should be considered pornografic material, and thus, removed.

How exactly do they determine this? By how explicit the picture is? By what are the people in the picture doing? Of course not... it's all in how POPULAR the member is! If you're still not very well-known, and you can go fuck yourself. Your work will be deleted, and you'll get the chance of getting your ass banned out of that place!

But if you have a decent amount of people following you, you're pretty much safe! After all, if they do anything to any of your precious works, your fans will cause so much of a rocus that the DA staff will have too much of a hard time solving the situation. Proving that those staff members are nothing short of spineless.

Someone broke the rules? Punish them! People are bitching because you punished someone who diserved it in the first place? Punish them as well!

You guys are aware that 90% of your community is composed of childish/stupid people who'll give you little to no profit anyway. You want those to get in the way of decent, talented artists from joining? No? Then start acting like proper staff members, and DO YOUR FUCKING JOB!

Some of you must be wondering, "Oh, but Fontes, you're complaining so much, but you can't do any better!"

Well... wrong. I can, and here's a lil' suggestion for any DA staff member who might be reading this, regarding adult content.

You could add a secondary mature tag, which would serve for explicit pornographic content. How would anyone be able to see this type of content? Through an addition to a Premium Membership which would allow them to see this "Super-Mature" content. To prevent scams, this add-on of sorts could not be bought for anyone other than the buyer. This means that an adult could not buy this for someone else, and stuff like that. Tagging the deviations as "Super-Mature" should be available only those with Premium Memberships.

This way you would not only allow pornographic content (except child porn, for obvious reasons), while making money out of it! Some kid managed to snatch his parent's credit card, and was able to get the add-on? It's his parent's fault, not yours!

PROBLEM FUCKING SOLVED!!! Imagine the money you guys would gain out of lonely perverts who'd be browsing DA all day just for porn images! WHERE'S YOUR VISION, GODDAMMIT?!

Now... *whew*... back to that thing I said that despite all this (and a lot more) non-sense, I still hang around DeviantArt.

While most of the community, at least from my point of view, can be considered scum, there's still a great amount of people who are worth interacting with. Also, with such a large community, DeviantArt is still a great place to show your work, and get people to eventually follow what you do, get people to ask you for commissions, etc. Also, I don't hang around it THAT much. I mostly just browse the few people I follow, and check comments and favs on my own stuff. I'm there to show my stuff and do business, pretty much. :P

In the end, it's a bit of a love/have thing. I still like DeviantArt for having such a large community, despite the fact that there are plenty of negative aspects to it.

And DAAAAAMN, this was quite a long author comment. I'd better go before I crash Smackjeeves' servers, or something!